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Tag Archives | Money Cat

“The Global Pursuit of Happiness, or: The Army of Luck” is an impressive piece of installation art by Boris Petrovsky, Georg Nagel, and Nina Martens.

The work is based around the Maneki Neko (aka Beckoning Cat; aka Lucky Cat/Money Cat), a common Japanese figurine which is believed to bring luck, attract customers and bring prosperity.

520 of the shiny, golden, XXL Lucky Cats are arranged in 40 rows and 13 columns on a ramp-like stand made of aluminum.

The Lucky Cats form a dot-matrix display, which consists of 520 waving paw grid points as its pixels. A servo motor in each cat controls the paws, and moves them exactly in position and speed.

Words and sentences up to 40 characters long can be entered into an attached keyboard, and are displayed with the paws, letter by letter, as a sliding text marquee. The Lucky Cats are also able to perform spontaneously as well, showing 25 different salutatory and signalizing gestures, as well as mass movements like the Mexican Wave or an ecstatic hyperkinesis.